Subject: Re: Responses
From: Jim Rovira (jrovira@drew.edu)
Date: Mon Jul 15 2002 - 09:54:23 EDT
Dang, Robbie, now I'm going to have to ask for some time to respond. :)
Immediately and off the top of my head, though, I wasn't saying Swete offered
"proof" that there was a canon (in the Biblical sense) by Christ's day, but that
he presented "strong evidence" that there was. The position you're arguing for
is a null hypothesis dependent solely upon a lack of evidence (-there was no
Biblical canon in Christ's day-). Any evidence at all works against it.
You could argue positively for a literary canon in Christ's day, but you would
have to develop criteria distinguishing between quotations that supported a
Biblical canon and quotations supporting a literary one. I think it would be a
highly speculative enterprise.
I think the fact of being chosen for Greek translation is significant. When
you're translating either to fill a library or meet the needs of a community,
you translate the works most important to you and the community you are serving.
And when we look at the NT quotations of the LXX, we need to recognize that the
text is quoted with significant authority -- pointing to a Biblical canon rather
than a literary canon.
I'm aware of remarkable differences in style between Genesis 1 and 2, but that's
not necessarily proof supporting the DH more than any other documentary theory.
We can equally suppose, for example, that a single author (even Moses) wrote
both texts, but drew from different sources -- and that this sole text was
edited and amended somewhat by later editors. I think that would support the
evidence as well.
To me, "physical evidence" supporting the DH would consist of texts dating a
good 1000 years before the DSS that looked something like the text Rosenberg
prepared for Bloom. "Physical evidence" disproving the DH would consist of texts
dating a good 1000-1500 years before the DSS that looked a lot like the DSS. We
lack physical evidence either way. We only support theories based upon their
explanatory power somewhat after the fact, and I think a number of different
theories can explain the present text with almost equal effectiveness.
I like your responses about literacy in the NT period, though...I think you
raised a good point. If Christ was seen as an anomaly, that would speak against
literacy. The question is...was he an anomaly because he could read? Not
necessarily. In another passage, Christ sits down in a good old synagogue
reading and reads from the scroll of Isaiah. The feeling I had from that
passage was that reading from the scrolls was:
1. just a normal part of the Hebrew service.
2. participated in my all adult males attending, not just the Rabbis, probably
at intervals...they'd take turns reading.
So the anomaly Christ posed may be better understood in terms of the insight you
get from deep study, rather than just the ability to read. But as you said, I
think this is a moot point to our larger discussion.
Jim
"L. Manning Vines" wrote:
> Jim said:
> << ...I think you're overestimating the illiteracy of Jesus' crowd (any
> male
> of any significance was taught to read Hebrew, I believe) [. . . .] >>
>
> Are you supposing this or do you know of some specific evidence? I wasn't
> sure of the Jewish literacy rate of the time, so was sure to mention
> illiteracy with a "perhaps" or three. Jewish culture today and for quite a
> long time has placed great value in literacy and, to varying degrees, even
> in Hebrew (the effort to revive the language in the late 19th and early 20th
> century was described as something like persuading people to use
> conversationally a language that they already knew). But I am unsure of the
> state of things in Jesus' time. I would be very interested to learn more,
> if you can point to something I am unaware of.
>
> I think now that my suggestion of illiteracy was based upon the tacit belief
> that, in ancient times, most of the world was illiterate, coupled with the
> presumption that the large community of Jews in Jerusalem at that time was
> so sufficiently secure that Hebrew literacy was not, as it was at other
> times, an important point of cultural identity.
>
> Now that you've brought me to think of it, though, I am also reminded of the
> surprise expressed at several places in the gospels when Jesus, a
> carpenter's son, demonstrates erudition. I found John 7:15, where the Jews
> in the temple courts say, in Greek: "Pos houtos grammata oiden me
> memathekos," which, translated, is something like, "How has this one known
> the written things (or drawn, or etched - grammata) without having learned?"
> The word that I have translated as "having learned" is "memathekos," which
> is a form in the perfect of "manthano." The lexicon attached to my Greek
> New Testament actually points to this very verse in its entry for "manthano"
> with a suggested meaning of "attend a rabbinic school." I doubt that this
> interpretative translation is justified, but the Jewish authority is
> described as having surprise that the child of an ordinary blue-collar Jew
> would be so learned in the "written things." I am sure that several other
> instances of this occur, although I am not sure precisely where. I trust
> that your knowledge and memory of the New Testament is generally better than
> mine.
>
> I can't say that this is evidence that most Jews could not read, but it does
> seem to suggest that most were not highly literate. I would take this to be
> true at least of the carpenters and the rest of their class, which I would
> presume to be the majority. You suggest something like this when you say
> parenthetically that any male "of any significance" would be taught to read
> Hebrew, but I wonder what exactly you mean by that. I am not prepared to
> make a controversial assertion, but now that you've made me think more about
> it, I rather more suspect as true what before I only suggested in passing.
>
> Literate or not, though, I think that nothing in this conversation is at
> stake here.
>
> Jim said:
> << [I think you are] ignoring how
> the Hebrew Scriptures were used in the NT. I think it's significant that
> Christ referred to "the" law and "the" prophets -- that was not an unusal
> division. >>
>
> I don't understand what you're asserting, here. It is true that the
> division between the law and the prophets was not unusual. It seems to me
> like a natural division. I should add that the Talmud was not yet written,
> and it records law: so the law in Jesus' time might have included law that
> is not in the Torah. The use of the definite articles there seems to me
> perfectly usual in both Greek and English, whether the law and the prophets
> refer to canonized books or not.
>
> Jim said:
> << It could be argued, of course, that the use of the Hebrew
> Scriptures by the NT writers contributed to the NT canon, but a Jewish
> canon arose at least eventually that had amazing parallels to the Christian
> canon -- I find it difficult to believe that these two traditions developed
> a very similar canon separately after the time of Christ, or that either
> was dependent upon the other after the time of Christ. It makes more sense
> to me to think they were both drawing upon a root tradition before the time
> of Christ. >>
>
> What ancient Hebrew books were denied entry to either canon? The books that
> were not canonized were excluded, it seems to me, on the grounds that they
> were written in Greek and/or were not ancient enough.
>
> The wide differences between the Masoretic text and the Septuagint, the
> inclusion of the Hebrew of both versions and others in the collection at
> Qumran, seems to me like all the necessary evidence to make a damn strong
> case for what I have been saying. It seems certain that shortly before the
> Christian era, at least to the people in the Near East, the idea of the book
> was a different beast than it is now. It seems to me that would be
> necessarily true for the Hebrew variants to have existed and survived long
> enough to be archived by the Qumran community. I suspect that this was also
> true apart from major intellectual centers prior to that time and in
> different places. Books allowed for significant emendation and evolution in
> a way that they do not today. I don't think that it can be said with
> certainty that this attitude lasted into Jesus' time, but it MIGHT have. I
> don't think that it can be ruled out with the evidence at hand.
>
> Jim said:
> << Swete goes on and cites other evidence, then asserts that
> "though the direct evidence is fragmentary, it is probable that before
> the Christian era Alexanria possessed the whole, or nearly the whole, of
> the Hebrew Scriptures in Greek translation" (25).
> [. . .]
> Swete closes his introductory remarks by saying "thus while the
> testimony of the first century AD does not absolutely require us to
> believe that all the books of the Hebrew canon had been translated
> and were circulated in a Greek version druing the Apostolic age,
> such a view is not improbable; and it is confirmed by the fact that
> they are all contained in the canon of the Greek Bible which the
> Christian Church received from its Jewish predecessors" (27).
> [. . .]
> I think it's important to note the use of the word "canon." The
> importance of this collection and its being quoted with some authority
> in Philo, Josephus, and by the NT authors -- and being accorded some
> authority by simply being gathered with the books of the Law -- is that
> the canon existed more in a sacred sense than in a literary sense. I
> suspect the LXX, which does indeed seem to have been a fairly complete
> collection of the Law, the Prophets, and the Writings and hagiographa
> prior to the time of Christ, is also testimony to the idea of a sacred
> canon prior to the time of Christ. While the boundaries of this canon
> were somewhat fluid, it seems they did exist. >>
>
> That Swete says where you quote him, "though the direct evidence is
> fragmentary, it is probable that [. . . .]" and, "the
> testimony of the first century AD does not absolutely require us to believe
> that [. . . .]" ought to give clear enough the idea that he is saying things
> not everyone agrees with. And it's true. As I said before, it is also
> credibly asserted on various grounds that the post-Torah Septuagint was
> composed early in the Christian era. The composition post-Torah is too
> speculative for me to place much value in. But the translation into Greek
> is not synonymous, it seems to me, with canonization since it so abundantly
> clear by reading the Greek that the books were translated by different
> people and probably at different times, to be gathered as "Septuagint"
> later. Even if every book of the modern Tanakh were translated into Greek
> by the third century B.C.E., they might have been gathered from different
> sources and locales to become something of a compilation only in the
> Christian era. It just isn't clear.
>
> It is clear that the (then) recently written books concerning the Jews, most
> of them written in Greek, were not canonized and probably on account of
> their language and recent composition, which would make them less sacred to
> the canonizers. It is clear that as recently as when the founders of the
> Qumran community decided to leave town (first or second century B.C.E.)
> several versions of Hebrew texts that varied WIDELY were coëxisting. It is
> clear that versions disappeared within the mainstream community at an
> unknown time and for unknown reasons, leaving one text that become the
> canonized Masoretic. It is clear, after the Qumran find, that the
> Septuagint has preserved actual Hebrew texts whose separation from the
> Masoretic must have come prior to the canonization of the Masoretic and
> elimination of others.
>
> It seems perfectly within reason to me that the ultimate canonization
> included all available Hebrew-language books that seemed to be of a certain
> antiquity, eliminating all variants and favoring one version per book on
> grounds that are still utterly mysterious. It seems perfectly within reason
> to me to say that this happened sometime after the first or second century
> B.C.E. But when, exactly, it happened? Can't say. Before the Christian
> era? Maybe. But maybe not. Just can't say.
>
> But my assertion that books were much more dynamic than they are today is
> certainly true, it seems to me, within the Jewish community before the first
> and second centuries B.C.E. It might be true for a good while after that.
> I suspect that it's also true of different times and places, apart from
> copyright laws, printing presses, and major centers of scholarship.
>
> Cecilia said:
> << So, in the nineteenth century, a scholar named Julius Wellhausen
> presented
> the Authorial Hypothesis of the Pentateuch, that is, that Torah was
> composed by multiple people. Various scholars picked up that ball and
> established the actual number of authors, the temporal order of the
> authors, and the phases of the Hebrew faith associated with each. The
> authors are four [. . . .]>>
>
> I think that it's worth saying that the dates you gave for the sources --
> especially J and E -- are very controversial, perhaps more controversial
> than the rest of this stuff. It is usually agreed that P came pretty late,
> but you placed J firmly before E, in the Davidic dynasty around the tenth
> century B.C.E. This is one frequently held position, but another big one is
> that J and E were roughly contemporary, with J coming from the southern
> kingdom of Judea and E coming from the northern kingdom of Israel. Most
> opinions roughly follow one of these two, and I think it's pretty evenly
> divided now.
>
> Cecilia also said:
> << David Rosenberg supplies the text, stripped of any non-J
> elements, and Bloom the literarian analyzes it not as an exalted text but
> as a work of literature, which indeed it was. >>
>
> And in a later message:
> << Bloom's book is supported almost solely by the text. >>
>
> The biggest question about Bloom's book is not if it is supported by the
> text, but What text? Because the text that he criticizes owes its existence
> to Rosenberg, and if it represents cohesively a real text that existed
> before is not clear. The hypothesis of multiple authorship is almost
> universally acknowledged, but most all of the details are vehemently
> debated. There has (relatively) recently been great controversy over
> whether J and E were written by single authors or schools, and assertions of
> a J1, J2, J3, et cetera. I find most of the efforts to distinguish the
> strands with precision to be utterly unconvincing, and I am not at all
> alone. Various extractions of, for instance, the J material, differ widely,
> and different scholars account for the sources in particular passages very
> differently. Happily for me, it seems that many of the younger generation
> of scholars are losing patience with whole mess, and the bibliophilologists,
> as I called them in a previous post, seem to be growing in numbers.
>
> In short, I agree enthusiastically that the text is a work of literature and
> deserves analysis as such. But the text as Rosenberg supplied it to Bloom,
> stripped of any non-J elements, as you said, isn't as simply constructed as
> that makes it sound. I don't know how Rosenberg discriminated between J and
> non-J, but I know that he went out on a limb to do it because all such
> discriminations go out on a limb. I would be just as interested to learn
> about Rosenberg's textual analysis as I would be to learn about Bloom's
> literary analysis, as the latter relies overtly on the former and the former
> is necessarily highly controversial. But from what I understand, the former
> receives much less attention in the Book of J. All of the criticism I've
> heard for the book that was not simply "Bloom says interesting but
> unsupported things" was aimed at Rosenberg. Bloom's analysis, as I think I
> said in response to Will's message, is of a theoretically constructed text
> for whose construction Bloom can not very well argue. And that, I think,
> must be its greatest weakness.
>
> Jim said:
> << The documentary hypothesis, technically, has NO
> physical evidence supporting it. The only texts we have are pretty much
> of the whole books or fragments of the whole books. What is observed in
> the text could just as well be the result of editorial impositions on a
> text substantially written by a single author, esp. if that single
> author drew from a number of source texts written in different languages
> and by different people. It's a fascinating thesis and has great
> explanatory power, but it's hardly "proven." >>
>
> The birth of the hypothesis, I think, must have been in the first two
> chapters of Genesis. Anyone who reads them with an open eye will be
> puzzled, and this is the case to an extraordinarily greater degree in
> Hebrew. Two vastly different creation stories are back to back, and in
> Hebrew the difference in language is about as striking as the difference in
> plot. God gets an extra name in the second story, God produces with a
> different word (the second chapter is "yatsar" instead of "bar'a," which is
> a more physical "form" or "fashion" rather than "create"), he blows life
> into the fashioned dust rather than speaking it into existence from nothing,
> he does it all in a different order, and rather than the first story's
> simple and symmetrical parataxis (it reads like good Hemingway), the second
> begins with a long and elaborate sentence spanning what is now divided into
> three verses, and continues with complex subordinates. The two stories
> could not be more stylistically different. Many have puzzled over the
> literary value of the juxtaposition -- I wrote a bit about it in big and
> important paper last semester -- but there aren't any very pat answers.
> Taking the two to have been composed at different times, to be artfully
> placed by a later redactor, makes a great deal of sense. And this logic can
> then be applied further and further. Often too far, in my opinion.
>
> I think that the work of a redactor in the Torah is like biological
> evolution: somehow innately improvable, given to endless debate even if only
> about the details amongst those who believe it to be true, but still
> possessing some aspect of certainty that is hardly deniable to any
> reasonable person.
>
> Tim said:
> << I'm a terrible student of religion, and [this conversation] is wasted on
> me. >>
>
> Religion often has a tough follower in me, too -- but it's the old books,
> the great ancient literature, that draws me in. A music teacher I had this
> last year once thought he would become a rabbi. He discovered, though, that
> the religion wasn't for him and it was only the books that held his
> attention. Reading about Abraham and David, Job and Jesus, even Augustine
> and Anselm, is endlessly fascinating to me. They have made me fantasize
> about being a profoundly religious man, in fact, a rabbi or a priest. But
> at the end of the day, the religion won't go down my throat, and I find that
> I'm merely taken by a love for old books. If it was ever written on papyrus
> or parchment in a language or dialect no longer or seldom spoken, it will
> take me right in, and with ease.
>
> -robbie
> -
> * Unsubscribing? Mail majordomo@roughdraft.org with the message
> * UNSUBSCRIBE BANANAFISH
-
* Unsubscribing? Mail majordomo@roughdraft.org with the message
* UNSUBSCRIBE BANANAFISH
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b25 : Tue Sep 17 2002 - 16:27:01 EDT